How I fell out of love with drinking

I used to take long baths when I was hungover. I would run the water as hot as I could take it, hot enough to sting, and I would lie in the tub for an hour sometimes, letting the steam noodle into my brain as I ran through a list of standard questions. Did I say anything stupid? Do I remember how I got home last night?

These mental checklists are familiar to hard-core drinkers. They become a way of organizing anxiety, to figure out if apologies are needed, if embarrassment will be required. Will there be an exhausting emotional confrontation (“I don’t know why I said that about your boyfriend”), or could I spend my day on the futon, stuffing my face with macaroni and cheese and watching reality-TV marathons until the vise grip of my hangover finally eased? Although everyone’s mental checklist is a little bit different, one question is almost universally the same.

Am I drinking too much?

I asked that question countless times during my drinking years. I wondered it privately, as I dragged out a recycling bin heavy with clank, and I wondered it aloud, on phone calls to trusted confidantes made on shaky, low-down mornings. You’re fine, you’re totally fine, my friends usually told me, because they wanted to lift my mood, and because I mostly looked fine, and because for many years, “Am I drinking too much?” seemed like an inevitable question of modern female life, the kind of thing any free-spirited but conscientious woman would ask while cleaning a beer bottle crammed with 50 cigarette butts.

In my mother’s era, women weren’t supposed to drink like men. It was unseemly, unnatural. But by the time I got to university, drinking like men was a badge of honor. Alcohol felt transgressive, an easy rebellion against a smile-and-act-nice world, and I took pride in the way I could slurp down my margaritas while the other girls vomited in the bushes and passed out on the couch. “You can really hold your liquor,” guys told me, which was like winning a race for which I’d never even trained. I just loved booze: The taste of it, the release of it, the way it transformed boring evenings into epic events. Mostly, I loved how it transformed me — from an anxious over-thinker tugging at the hem of her sleeves to a mouthy firebrand. Alcohol was like pixie dust on an ordinary life.

Of course bad things sometimes happened when we drank. That was part of the fun — the thrill and the damage. One night I tumbled down the cement steps outside my apartment. Another night a good friend drove me back from a party and then, an hour later, asked me how we’d gotten home. I had blackouts — minutes and sometimes hours of walking amnesia, where I kept raging at the party but later could not remember a thing — and they freaked me out. Then again, my friends had blackouts too. Were we drinking too much? Yes, and it was awesome. We were good kids, who would go on to have high-pressure careers, and these years felt like required overindulgence. Drinking too much was drinking right.

I thought for sure I’d stop drinking so much when I finally got a grown-up job, but instead, the set pieces just changed. I had expendable income and credit cards to burn now. My drinking moved from crowded house parties with cheap domestic brew to cozy corner pubs where the bartender gave me a regular’s discount. I tried all the new wine bars, and grew savvy about martinis. By my late 20s, friends started to get married, and every season brought another bachelorette blowout, another open-bar celebration, and I honed my schtick as the perpetually single girl with the zany stories to tell. “Drinking too much” was the anthem of the era’s most beloved heroines, Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, and it began to feel like you weren’t living unless you collected a few horrible one-night stands along with your empties.

I woke up Sundays with my head on fire, and I ran the hot bath till the mirrors fogged with steam. Was I drinking too much? The answer almost certainly was yes. I’d fell and busted my knee open in a club one night and limped out, wasted and laughing, as blood trickled down my shin. I had developed a habit of throwing the wine cork away when I opened a bottle, because it was inconceivable to me I might not drink it all. But sometimes, on Sunday, my friends called me and expressed the same timid doubt. They had gotten too wild at a party. They had woken up with some guy (or girl). When I looked around at the bar, I saw people like me: Successful, lusty, quick with a laugh. In a world where everyone you know is “drinking too much,” no one is.

When did this change? When did I finally realize I had a problem? People often ask me, and it’s hard to pinpoint, like asking a woman who has left her husband about the moment she stopped being in love. Recovery narratives are fabled for their “rock-bottom moment,” the light bulb epiphany when you finally see your problem with clarity, but my “rock-bottom moments” didn’t last very long. Two days, four days max. It’s not that I didn’t have epiphanies; I had them all the time. I would run that bath, my skin turned pink and raw, and it would be clear to me that I needed to stop. But then I would join my friends at brunch near noon, and we would tell heroic stories about our misdeeds, and it was clear to me that I was being dramatic. Light bulb: I drink too much. Light bulb: I need a drink. Both were equally true, for a long time.

But the bar stools beside me were growing more empty. I had less and less company on my reckless nights. At 31, I moved to New York, where “drinking too much” is a way of life, but my friends were married and had kids now. My coworkers were no longer binge-drinking 20-somethings but overworked parents and strivers who mostly skipped happy hour. I drank alone more, which made me feel less accountable. No one was watching. But it shifted my relationship with booze from mostly a social activity to a private habit. There are many ways to define alcoholism, but one I often use is the moment when drinking tips from “want” into “need.” Did I go into physical withdrawals when I didn’t have a bottle of wine on a Friday? No. But I sometimes climbed the walls. My mind turned against me. I needed the drink to settle me, soothe my nerves. I needed the drink just so I could stop thinking about needing the drink.

I didn’t have a bath tub in my New York apartment, so I sat on the floor of the shower and let the scalding water pelt my back. I was drinking too much. No question. The question had become: What am I going to do about that? Anyone who has left a marriage can tell you, there is often a long lag time between “this relationship doesn’t work” and “I am getting a divorce.” The lag time can last years. The lag time can last forever. What do you do in the meantime? You try to make it work. Get a new job. Go into therapy. Eat broccoli. Get a new apartment with a tub. Because if you love something the way I loved alcohol — if you believe this elixir transforms you, fixes you, fills you with the sparkle of life — then you will be very, very reluctant to call it a day.

I called an older and wiser woman who had been sober for decades. I wanted her to give me the answers, to rearrange me somehow. “How old are you?” she asked.

“34,” I said.

And she said, “That’s about right.”

She had also quit drinking in her mid-30s. Many of us do. We have aged out of the years when falling off our barstool is cute. We are starting to think about families, and why we don’t have one, or what to do about the ones we are drinking ourselves away from. Women are worriers. We worry about how we look in this dress, what we said at that meeting, if we hurt that person’s feelings. Drinking was the release from such worry for me, but it had become a ferocious source of new anxiety. I could not remember my evenings. Friends were pulling away from me. My therapist told me it didn’t make sense to continue our work if I didn’t stop drinking. And I was paying her!

I never woke up one morning and looked in a mirror and JUST KNEW. My decision to stop drinking was a slow collection of facts — a preponderance of the evidence, you might say. I was not afraid I would lose everything; I was more afraid I would stay the same. I would never change. I would be this lost person forever, cackling with a purple mouth at 3am and crying the next morning in her steaming bath, an endless cycle of release and regret.

It’s been five years since I took a drink. What I can’t believe is how much easier my life is without alcohol. Not at first, of course, because change is painful and slow, and the first year of sobriety was perhaps the most challenging time of my life. I had to stop reaching for a cocktail glass to transform my mood; I had to find other ways to be close to people. I held on to the small joys, which were the only size joys came in: A blue-sky Sunday morning without a hangover, a luxurious bath that did not feel steeped in my own shame. Was I drinking too much? I was not. I was finally clear on that — and, later, much more.

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